Data - NSHD Data Archive

The MRC National Survey of Health and development (NSHD) has a
data archive with over 20,000 variables collected over the lifetime
of the study. The archive preserves data and meta-data
(descriptions of the data) in electronic, paper, fiche, and,
increasingly, image form, and includes biological samples.

Within available resources and constraints, the study team have
converted the 60 year old ‘in house’ paper-based documentation into
two websites: the meta-data repository and SWIFT-NSHD (The Secure
Web Interface for the NSHD).

The meta-data repository holds electronic versions of all the
NSHD questionnaires and topic level guides to the information
collected. The repository is accessible to bone fide researchers
who may wish to use the NSHD for research purposes. Potential and
existing users can use the repository to explore the NSHD meta-data
(descriptions of the data) to enable them to formulate proposals
for using variables from the NSHD.

SWIFT-NSHD is a variable retrieval tool which allows registered
users to create their own bespoke NSHD data sets.

This work has been partly funded by the MRC Data
Preservation and Sharing Initiative which aims to improve
accessibility to anonymised scientific data across the research
community.